IMAGINATION VERSUS MYTH

Some of you may have been aware of the controversy when Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.”  The author of the original story, itself, Hans Christian Andersen, described Ariel by saying “. . . her skin was as clear and delicate as a rose-leaf, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea.”  How does this description fit Ms. Bailey?  And were the outraged fans simply literalists who insisted that the director and producers of the movie follow Andersen’s plotline in every regard, or were they outraged that a person of color had co-opted a popular myth.  Black mermaids?  What would be next?  Athena with locs in her hair?  Brown-skinned leprechauns? This post discusses imagination versus myth and why this license is taken.

I had a little existential crisis myself when the play “Hamilton” came out.  I would bet that the Alexander Hamilton we all know of (and who once lived only seven miles from where I do) was white, though he was born in the West Indies and who knows who his father really was—certainly Hamilton did not?  To see a person of color (Michael Luwoye) play him annoyed me a bit at first.  I wondered how black audiences might respond if someone produced a revisionist movie or play on the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, and cast Rosa Parks as a white person, or someone of Asian descent?  But I resisted these thoughts, because no positive end can come from it, and because imagination opens the door to many other creative possibilities.  That can be a good thing.  As a result, today, when a young black kid who loves Shakespeare wants to participate in a play, he does not have to wait until Othello comes around (if it ever, does.)  He can play Hamlet or MacBeth, and so well he might receive a standing ovation.  So, sometimes change is good.  

Not all change, perhaps.  Who would want to see me recruited as a Girl Scout leader?  How could young women of “tween” age relate to me, and I to them?  Or, do we want racial quotas for every possible movie? Should biological males be allowed to compete in women’s sports under the current thinking concerning transgender transitioning?  J K Rowling does not think so in any event.  So, perhaps we should not let our imaginations run wild in every instance.

What I’ve written about above deals with both imagination and myth.  Here is where I am going with this . . .

In today’s edition of “Medium,” there is a reference to “Injustice Magazine” in which author Sam Young has an interesting essay on liberals and conservatives.  I used to describe these two terms to my Poli 201 students.  While I usually spent the better part of an hour on the topic, the textbook definitions in a nutshell were essentially that liberals look to the future for answers to current challenges and conservatives look to the past.  Of course, a single phrase is hardly enough to describe each term, but it’s a start.

Today, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are pejorative terms to some factions of our society.  Sam Young was taking a somewhat different tack than I in describing these terms. He spoke of them in terms of imagination and myth.

For example . . .

Pick out a problem in our society.  It could be the lack of health care available to rural Native Americans.  It could be programming errors in the software of driverless cars.  It could be toxic levels of lead in the water pipes in Flint, Michigan.  Maybe the math skills of eighth graders across the country need to be vastly improved.  How do you find a solution, a cure, a fix?  In many cases, it takes imagination.  And, of course, money.

Liberal imagination

Liberals are good at imagination.  They love to come up with new solutions to challenging problems.  Take segregation for instance.  Early in the last century, liberals saw segregation as a problem in America.  Their imaginative musings and hopes are described by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 in his “I Have a Dream” speech:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.”

Following integration, liberals then pushed for interracial marriage and interracial adoption.  With each step of the way they met resistance from conservatives who called integration a communist plot to destroy America, and interracial marriage (codified in Loving v. Virginia) was thought to be totally corrupt, immoral or unGodly in the minds of some conservatives.  Even today, and as recently as last week, the terms communism and Marxism were used by conservatives to paint liberals and democrats in an unflattering light (this time in a Republican attack against the judiciary in America.)

Liberals don’t lie awake at night wondering how to increase the size and scope of government, but what they imagine using does cost money and it creates jobs (when dealing with controlling pollution such as acid rain, dioxin, water contamination and so on.)

But I’d encourage you to test the premise that conservatives are unimaginative by thinking about how they might find imaginative ways forward—or not–in the areas of transgender rights.  Probably, they would not grant any rights except for the sex they were assigned to at birth. Or, should government be concerned with promoting more women to be CEO’s or CFO’s of major Wall Street firms.  Currently of the S&P 500 companies, 459 CEOs are male and just 41 are female.  Conservatives would say they don’t support affirmative action and businesses should be free to promote whoever they wish to.  This is none of governments concern.  Or, they may say that this imbalance is not a problem at all.

It’s a fact (or should be) that oil and gas reserves on this planet will not last forever, and probably less than two more centuries.  What would an imaginative, conservative response be here?  Or, how would conservatives deal imaginatively in allowing Muslim clerics to provide opening prayers at high school football games and/or commencement ceremonies?  Most likely they would not support this, either.  Baptist ministers enjoy this privilege.  Methodists and even Lutherans are invited to lead in prayer.  Possibly even a Catholic, but the U.S. government, itself,  seems to discriminate against Roman Catholics (to wit, of 62 U.S. House of Representatives chaplains, only two have been Catholic.  Of 62 chaplains in the U.S. Senates history, only onehas been Catholic.  Never has a chaplain in Congress been Jewish.  Are rabbis unfairly passed over because of religious discrimination?  Are Muslim clerics?)

Conservative myths

According to author Mary Midgley writing in The Myths We Live By:

Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning.”

Conservatives do not recall history the same as liberals do. In America, they often believe that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation based partly on the Declaration of Independence where there are four references to God.  In fact, based on the Constitution written thirteen years later, this was not so, because there are no references to God in the cornerstone of our law.  The Bill of Rights, which shortly followed ratification notes that in the First Amendment “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .”  And there are other points that Conservatives cherry-pick from early America history which they use to state their argument.  However, there are as many contradictory points that can be made as well.  To believe (especially if it is not true) that God planned for America to be a Christian nation puts people of other faiths at risk even today.¹

Then, too, conservatives do not view slavery exactly the same as liberals might.  Witness Florida’s State Academic Standards – Social Studies [for] 2023 that were published under Governor Ron DeSantis:

“SS.68.AA.2.3 Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation). 

Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit “

Governor DeSantis was not involved in writing the educational standards, he noted, and he probably was not (though he defended them.)  But clarification 1 to SS.68.AA.2.3 is the product of the prevailing myth that slavery had its good points along with its bad points.  On its face, admittedly, there is some truth to this.  Some slaves did learn blacksmithing as an example, and that is not something that comes intuitively.  But as critics have pointed out, slavery was not a job training program and we need to be careful not to see it as somehow benevolent. Too often when we think of slavery, we think of Hattie McDaniel who played Mammy in “Gone with the Wind.”

Are taxes higher than ever?

One other myth I commonly hear is that “government” takes more of your tax money today than ever before. I can’t count the number of times I read where someone bemoans a particular crime or scam and they say “This didn’t happen when I was growing up.”  Well, of course it did.  Currently, the highest marginal tax rate paid to the IRS is 37%.  In 1973 it was 70%. In 1943, it was 88% of a taxpayer’s taxable income.  Thinking that taxes are higher now than ever is a myth.  Of course, one pays more in sales tax and property tax now than in the past, but people are also making more money than ever in most cases as well.  I made $52.50 a week after taxes at my first job when I was sixteen back in 1966.  But that’s only $2,730 a year, and who can live on that?

In fact, conservatives often hold myth to be true in the face of contrary established scientific fact. Their adherence to wacky ideas and theories of their own may have caused the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of the one million plus people who died from COVID during the pandemic.  Churches were not particularly “under attack” when counties banned public gatherings of any sort.  Nor were vaccines designed to deliberately sicken or poison people or developed though aborted fetuses in every instance.  And, the COVID response was not communist or Marxist in any way as some conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives might have you believe.

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Footnotes

¹For example, a decade ago in Texas, Joe Strauss was a conservative Republican who was Speaker of the House of Representatives in Austin.  However, some Republican lawmakers and donors decided that was not enough.  Strauss was Jewish, and they tried to oust him in favor of a conservative Christian.   Removing Jews from positions in public life was one of the early initiatives in Nazis Germany.